“you can’t manage what you don’t monitor”… run a “statsd” server to gather metrics on events, actions and durations in your app – I made a docker image to help with this during development

improve console debug/output/start-up output with “cli-tables” and “colors” – personally I like to (programmatically) print out all of the endpoints an application exposes… which saves on external documentation

“expressjs” is popular, but “restify” lets you add all kinds of extra metadata on to your routes which you can then act on (easier permission handling, debug data output, etc)

make use of “sinon“s “sandbox” functionality to easily stub and reset object properties and methods (for testing in isolation) – and “istanbul” makes code coverage easy

restrict and validate data with “joi” – note: it does not prevent SQL Injection or HTML characters in strings, that’s on you (take a look at “striptags” and “xss“)